"Now it was from this very creed of Zoroaster
that the Jews derived all the angelology of their religion...the belief in
a future state; of rewards and punishments, ...the soul's immortality, and
the Last Judgment - all of them essential parts of the Zoroastrian
scheme." From The Gnostics and Their Remains (London 1887) by King
and Moore quoted at 607a in Peake's Bible Commentary.

FROM ENCYCLOPEDIA AMERICANA : "First,
the figure of Satan, originally a servant of God, appointed by Him as His
prosecutor, came more and more to resemble Ahriman, the enemy of God.
Secondly, the figure of the Messiah, originally a future King of Israel
who would save his people from oppression, evolved, in Deutero-Isaiah for
instance, into a universal Savior very similar to the Iranian Saoshyant.
Other points of comparison between Iran and Israel include the doctrine of
the millennia; the Last Judgment; the heavenly book in which human actions
are inscribed; the Resurrection; the final transformation of the earth;
paradise on earth or in heaven; and hell." by J. Duchesne-Guillemin,
University of Liege, Belgium

MONOTHEISM

Fundamentally the Jews were polytheists. But whatever its
date, the idea of the covenant tells us that the Israelites were not yet
monotheists, since it only made sense in a polytheistic setting. God
stated that there are many gods: "Thou shalt have no other gods
before me"(Exodus 20:3). The full monotheistic conception of God came
later (Isaiah 43:10-13, Jer 10:1-16). The second Isaiah juxtaposes the
great Persian King Cyrus with the first monotheistic declarations in the
Bible. The second Isaiah is the first expression of universalism which has
no antecedent in the Bible, according to the Anchor Bible note at Isaiah
45. He also first introduces the idea of false gods - a fundamental and
indispensable criteria for monotheism. A universal God determines that
only one is worshiped; a tribal god, of necessity, implies polytheism
since there are other tribes. Before the exile, God was a vengeful,
bloodthirsty, and jealous anthropomorphic tribal God of fear. After the
exile, He became a good, perfect, remote, and universal God of love:
identical to Ahura-Mazda. It needed the subsequent missions of Nehemiah
and Ezra backed by the Achaemenian Imperial Government's authority to make
the Jews ruefully conform to the new ideal of monotheism.

EZRA, THE SUBVERTER OF JUDAISM

In 397 B.C. Ezra, a courtier of the Persian king, was sent
from Babylon "to teach in Israel statutes and ordinances" (Ezra
7:10). Ezra had been born and educated as a divine reader in Babylon and
was sent by Artaxerxes to see if the people of Judea "be agreeable to
the law of God". There are explicit indications of widespread
religious conversion in Ezra 6:19-21 and Nehemiah 10:28-29, but why would
Jews have to convert to Judaism? Nehemiah, chapter 8, discusses an event
where Ezra read from the book of law which neither Hebrew speakers nor
Aramaic speakers could understand - the words had to be translated by
priests. What strange language could Ezra have been reading, Avestan
maybe? Ezra's major reform was the prohibition of foreign wives. Although
marrying foreign wives had always been the most favored Jewish practice,
such marriages violate Zoroastrian law (e.g. Denkard, Book 3, ch 80). The
alien nature of other laws to the Jews shows itself in the distinction
between clean and unclean animals in Leviticus and Ezekial which was
derived from the Vendidad, a Zoroastrian holy book, where alone it is
explained. The purification rituals are identical in the Pentateuch and
the older Vendidad. Von Gall in Brasileia tou Theou, 1926, gives
a detailed catalog of Jewish laws taken from the Persians. Ezra also
introduced the new festival of booths in the seventh month, which is of
course the Zoroastrian holiday of Ayathrem. Finally, in about 400 B.C. the
Old Testament was put in written form when Jerusalem was still under the
power of the Persians.

SADDUCEES VS PHARISEES

The Jews greatly resisted the imposition of Zoroastrianism
charading as Judaism. The construction of the temple designed by the great
Persian king Cyrus for the Jews was delayed by both political and physical
means. "The true Israelis" built their own temple on MT. Gerizim
and wrote Jerusalem out of their Pentateuch. So, whatever the Persian
governors and priests were doing in Jersusalem in the name of Judaism, it
caused a great schism. The Sadducees, the 'purists', made up over 97% of
the population and believed in "no resurrection, neither angel, nor
spirit" (Acts 23:8) - in a word, no Persian ideas. The Pharisees or
Persian faction - Pharisee, Parsee, Farsi - never numbered very high, not
more than 6,000, although only Pharisaism survived the fall of Jerusalem
in 70 A.D.

CHRISTIANITY AS A MITHRAIC CULT

In addition, Christianity adopted these doctrines from
Zoroastrianism: baptism, communion - the haoma ceremony, guardian angels,
the heavenly journey of the soul, worship on Sunday, the celebration of
Mithras' birthday on December 25th, celibate priests that mediate between
man and God, the Trinity, Zvarnah - the idea that emanations from the sun
are collected in the head and radiate in the form of nimbus and rays, and
asha-arta, "the true prayer". Centuries later in Greece this
became Logos or "true sentence" and like in Persia it was
associated with fire. Mithraism is widely considered to be a syncretistic
religion, that is: a combination of Persian, Babylonian and Greek
influences. However, the Greek influence seems to be limited to the
identification in Greece of Mithras with the Greek god Perseus. The
Babylonian influence seems to have been limited to astrology. Perhaps,
though, the Persian interest in astrology has been overlooked.
Zoroastrians worshipped at alters on hills and had a whole class of
professional Magi or priests who had lots of time on their hands to do
astrological research. Rather than a syncretistic religion, it would be
more proper to call Mithraism a Zoroastrian subcult.

The center of the Mithric cult was in Tarsus in Cilicia,
Southeast Turkey. This is whence Paul, the founder of the Christian
church, came from as a young man. Paul's insight on the road to Damascus
was that instead of treating Jesus as a false savior, he could be
identified as the true savior if combined with the new idea of "the
second coming". That would cure the embarrassing fact that nothing
had come of Jesus' time on earth. The rest was simple, Paul identified
Jesus with Mithras and taught a modified Mithraism. That got Paul branded
as a heretic by the true church and James the brother of Jesus. Eventually
it cost Paul his life. However, the Mithric ideas were so generally
attractive that they eventually won out.

Zarathustra, Philo, The Achaemenids and Israel,
Lawrence Mills, Leipzig, 1903. Lawrence Mills was the brilliant
American professor at Cambridge who not only translated much of the
Avesta but published several books, including Our Own Religion in
Ancient Persia, Chicago 1913, giving comprehensive examples of
Persian words and ideas in the Bible. They have been reprinted.

The Mysteries of Mithra, Franz Cumont,
Chicago, 1903, also in Dover Books reprint.